Kuunda

Meet Mika van veen, Data Analyst at Kuunda! 📊✨ As a valued member of our team her main focus is running experiments and testing credit scoring models to analyse customer behaviour across different markets. Our data team sits at the core of of our business, and everything we do stems from the insights we derive from this nucleus. We're grateful that Mika forms part of that.

Processing over 4 billion transactional and behavioural data points every single day is the operational necessity that allows us to exist and scale where traditional financial models fail 📈. The recent FMO Debt Landscape Report emphasises that traditional banks and lenders systematically exclude early-stage ventures and informal businesses. This exclusion is driven by legacy credit processes that demand years of audited financial statements, historical credit histories, and physical collateral. By processing massive volumes of real-time alternative data, we are able to successfully bypass these traditional structures entirely and build a resilient credit ecosystem 🔋.

For MMOs, every agent who goes dark by midday is a transaction handed to a competitor 📉. For many product owners, uptime is treated as a product metric, but float liquidity rarely gets the same attention - until it becomes the blocker on another expansion strategy. Kuunda’s API-embedded overdraft solution changes this, whilst saving MMOs the hassle of acquiring a lending licence and having to finance an in-house infrastructure build. Here’s how 👇

Africa's economies are projected to grow 4.0% in 2026, with East Africa leading the continent at 5.8%. 🌍 Banking has moved in step with that trajectory: the financial sector's share of continental GDP rose 0.4 percentage points between 2020 and 2024, and industry analysts are increasingly describing the sector as shifting from defensive banking toward growth-oriented lending, even as elevated interest rates and currency volatility persist. This month's Digest unpacks McKinsey's latest read on this shift, what it looks like up close in Kenya, and why the report's take on "deeper inclusion" reads less like a forecast and more like a checklist for evaluating who you build your credit infrastructure with. Read the full edition below.

Bridging the Cash Gap with Credit Utility The June 2026 report from Affinity Africa, The State of Cash Dependency and Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa, highlights a critical disruption in the continent's financial evolution. While mobile money infrastructure has scaled phenomenally; processing over $1.1 trillion across 1.1 billion accounts; the report finds that over 90% of digital value is immediately withdrawn as physical cash. At the individual level, digital alternatives do not yet outperform cash for the daily decisions made by merchants, households, and small businesses. This cash dependency creates a severe system-level constraint, with only 5% of traditional bank credit currently reaching small and medium-sized enterprises. According to the report, the path to breaking this cycle lies in transaction-history-based credit. The ecosystem must provide immediate "reasons to stay digital" by offering merchant-facing value like zero-fee payment tools and data-driven credit 💳. This is precisely Kuunda's mission. Our goal is to act as the connective tissue between partners and convert raw daily data points into real-world credit utility. Through embedded financing solutions we eliminate the need for physical collateral, giving merchants a practical reason to keep their money digital 💰.

Driving higher revenue, customer loyalty, and transaction frequency begins with meeting partners right where they are. Discover how we power both Strategic and Banking Partners through embedded, risk-optimised credit capabilities built specifically for emerging markets! 🚀💡

Building a lending engine from scratch means capex, opex, and a long development runway before it even starts to earn its keep 💰. Kuunda gives strategic partners the lending engine they can plug directly into their existing systems, without the need to re-architect or restructure. Origination, decisioning and servicing comes pre-built and ready to scale, configured exactly to partners’ requirements with our modular, API-driven infrastructure. With our digital lending rails, strategic partners can reach new markets instantly, without the exorbitant infrastructure overhaul.

Most lenders expanding into emerging markets brace for double-digit default rates. Kuunda's blended default rate sits at roughly 1%. The how behind this figure: risk management, but not the static, credit score-based kind ⏳. Kuunda's behavioural risk engine continuously reads real transaction data, repayment patterns, top-up frequency and sales cycles, to build and maintain a living financial profile of every user 👤. Based on this profile, credit limits adjust in real time, expanding when the data supports it, compressing before over-indebtedness becomes a risk. Our infrastructure maintains non-performing loans at an exceptionally low level, whilst supporting the high-velocity lending cycles that keep capital working 💡. Safe access to emerging markets = real-time risk management with the returns to match 💰.

"A positive working environment comes first and foremost from how people treat each other, and then what’s achieved." Hear from our People Operations Support Specialist, Ethan, on internal operations, fostering team growth, and building a supportive culture at Kuunda! 🤝✨

Every bank chasing expansion into developing markets runs into the same calculation block. Traditional credit models were built for customers who already have a paper trail. The moment a bank looks past that population, its existing risk infrastructure has nothing to work with. Kuunda changes this calculation. Partners don't have to choose between speed and safety, or between this year's targets and next year's infrastructure roadmap. They plug into our behavioural risk engine that already exists, already works, and already scores the segment they've been locked out of.